Apollo 7 mission taught lessons about crew conflict

Today is the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 7. It's now largely forgotten, overshadowed by later Apollo's, but in its own way it was an important event.

In a direct technical sense, the mission was fairly boring. Its job was to do a full in-space test of the main Apollo spacecraft in Earth orbit, and that went fairly smoothly. There were some little surprises, and some minor problems that needed fixing, but nothing very serious.

In fact, the biggest problems during the mission were not with the equipment, but with the crew.

For one thing, they all came down with head colds (probably aggravated by the headward shift of body fluids in weightlessness, which causes congestion for a few days even in healthy astronauts). This was enough of a nuisance that future Apollo crews were quarantined for a little while just before launch, to make sure they didn't catch anything at the last minute.

More surprising yet, this was the first US spaceflight in which there was major friction between the crew and Mission Control.

Given a fairly long flight in which nothing very exciting was scheduled to happen, the flight planners had succumbed to the temptation to load the crew up with experiments, carefully scheduling every minute of their day. This probably wouldn't have worked too well even with a healthy crew, since such detailed crew schedules were invariably grossly over-optimistic.

With a sick crew, unsurprisingly, everything ran late, Mission Control was always pushing the crew to catch up, and eventually they rebelled. It didn't help that the spacecraft commander, Wally Schirra, had already decided that this was his last spaceflight . . . so he had no reason to be nice to people who kept making unreasonable requests.

Excessively optimistic schedules continued to be a problem throughout Apollo, but not until Skylab did another crew completely refuse to cooperate. Since Apollo 7 was the first time it happened, naturally Mission Control blamed the crew rather than the mission planners. Only much later did the planners learn that they simply couldn't micro-manage a long flight that way. (And then they had to re-learn it for the space stations Mir and ISS, after a couple of decades of micro-managing short shuttle flights.)

Aside from the crew issues, Apollo 7 was generally a conspicuous success, at a time when NASA badly needed one. The agency was still trying to recover from the schedule impact, not to mention the public-relations impact, of its first major disaster, the Apollo 1 fire of early 1967. A (mostly) smooth, successful Apollo 7 made a big difference.

Most significantly, Apollo 7 not only helped repair NASA's battered reputation, but it also served as an essential preliminary to a much more ambitious move. In NASA's original plan, Apollo 7 would have been followed by an Earth-orbit test of the complete Apollo spacecraft, including the lunar lander. But lander development was running late, and Apollo couldn't wait, not if Kennedy's end-of-the-decade deadline was to be met.

Worse, there were indications that the Soviets were preparing to send cosmonauts around the Moon. The Zond lunar-flyby missions were rather obviously unmanned tests of a stripped-down Soyuz. After several years of pulling ahead in the "space race", to be behind again was just what the US didn't need.

(Not until many years later did the West learn that the Zond test flights weren't nearly as successful as they looked. In particular, Zond 6's published results included spectacular photographs of the Earth and Moon. What the Soviets didn't mention was that Zond 6 had major equipment failures during its final descent, and that the film had been salvaged, with considerable difficulty, from the smashed wreckage of the capsule.)

So NASA was scheming to do something that hadn't been in the original plan at all, something a little risky: send the very next Apollo - the first manned flight on a Saturn V - into lunar orbit (without the lander). Not everyone in NASA management was happy about mounting such a daring mission so soon, with so much of the equipment and procedures so new. But in the end, there was general agreement that it seemed worth trying . . . if Apollo 7 showed that the spacecraft could be trusted.

So Apollo 7 may have seemed a bit humdrum, but it was a vital first step. And the next step made history.

One dosn't hear much about the Zond's earth-rise pictures, compared to Apollo 8's earth-rise series which came later. It seems NASA didn't send unmanned probes around the moon before the Apollo program got there?

Mark Shanahan, who wrote the Apollo 1 fire piece last year for the NS Space Blog has interviewed Apollo 7's Walt Cunningham recently about the 'Flight of the Phoenix'.

You can find the piece at www.racetothemoon.blogspot.com

Anonymous
on October 13, 2008 10:43 PM

Robert: the US sent Ranger spacecraft (one-way collision-course taking data), Lunar Orbiter spacecraft which produced lots of data and thousands of images, and Surveyor landers, all of them before Apollo 8 ever got there.

BTW: a number of earth-rise and earth-set images were obtained with Lunar Orbiters.

tim
on October 24, 2008 7:41 PM

And the Apollo 8 images carried much more emotional weight, because it was seen by the first three humans to ever leave the influence of the mother world.

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